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Thursday, 12 October 2017

FEEL THE POWER OF THE RAIN KEEPING ME COOL

There are more than enough reasons to have a sense of
burning injustice, and while there are bigger reasons than this one to feel
something extremely unfair has happened, I am surprised I had not come across
this one until now.

With the recent fiftieth anniversary of the start of BBC
Radio 1, there are few people left who don’t know that The Move’s “Flowers in
the Rain” was the first song played on the station, after a jingle, the theme
for Tony Blackburn’s breakfast show (“Beefeaters” by John Dankworth), and the
sound effect of Arnold the dog.

As told in the radio documentary “The Story of Flowers in
the Rain,” which I heard last week – Tony Blackburn narrates the programme
sounding completely unlike his DJ persona - the thunderclaps at the start of
the song led Blackburn to choose it as the first record to play, while the lush
musical arrangements, adding a pastoral setting to the song, were made by
co-producer and violinist Tony Visconti, most famous for his run of albums he produced
with David Bowie.

However, only two weeks after Blackburn’s first playing of
the song, which had reached number 2 in the charts, The Move were in court, convicted
of libelling the Prime Minister, and having all royalties for the song removed
from them in perpetuity, never to see a penny from it.

I was shocked. Importantly, this wasn’t the fault of The
Move itself, but rather that of Tony Secunda, their manager at the time.
Secunda was fond of publicity stunts, including an event at Birmingham Fire Station
to promote the band’s later single “Fire Brigade,” while sending out blackberry
pie and champagne for “Blackberry Way.” For “Flowers in the Rain,” five hundred
promotional postcards were printed, which decided to make use of the Prime
Minister, Harold Wilson, “in flagrante delicto” with his secretary at the time,
in order to make a point of comparison…

Wilson sued The Move for libel or, to be more accurate, he
sued the band, Secunda, the record label, the illustrator of the postcard, the
third party that arranged the printing of the postcards, and the printer. The
Labour PM was represented in court by the Conservative MP and barrister Quintin
Hogg, later Lord Hailsham, who successfully argued that Wilson had been
subjected to a “violent and malicious personal attack.”

Finding in favour of Wilson, the postcard had a perpetual
injunction placed on it – technically, this is still in place, so I can’t
really show or describe it properly, although it is not beyond the ability of
anyone to find an example of it – and all royalties for “Flowers in the Rain”
and the B side, “Lemon Tree,” would be distributed to charities of Wilson’s
choosing. These initially included Stoke Mandeville Hospital, birthplace of the
Paralympics, and The Spastics Society, now renamed Scope – the latter charity
had recently lost out on thousands of pounds due to a government tax change
affecting a football pools it had been running. In later years, the British
Film Institute, art galleries, the Variety Club, Bolton Lads Club and the St.
Mary’s Ladies’ Lifeboat Guild have been among the beneficiaries.

Roy Wood with Nancy Sinatra, who

recorded a cover of "Flowers in the Rain"

I still couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. Later, I
found the documentary to which I had been listening had actually been for the
fortieth anniversary of Radio 1, in 2007, but if the BBC were happy to have
played it again, it must have meant the situation had not changed – in 1995,
The Move’s lead singer, Roy Wood, took the Harold Wilson Charitable trust to
court to reroute the still incoming royalties to Birmingham Children’s
Hospital, but was told the original agreement could not be altered. It is
unsurprising that Wood considered The Move to have received “a longer sentence
than the Great Train Robbers.”

Wood was not interviewed directly for the documentary, but
fellow Move band members Bev Bevan and Trevor Burwood were, and it felt that
they had chalked up the whole affair as a bad experience, and moved on. Wood,
as the songwriter, would understandably be less sanguine about it. Yes, most of
the band had barely entered their twenties in 1967, but it was an action of
their manager that caused the court case, leading to Tony Secunda’s firing by
the band, which itself broke up soon after.

Wood and Bevan founded the Electric Light Orchestra, with
Roy Wood later leaving to set up Wizzard, then become a solo act, while Secunda
later managed T-Rex, Motörhead and The Pretenders, among others. English defamation laws
were reformed in 2013, but only applies to cases from the start of 2014.

I still don’t know what to make of this, apart from feeling that
this shouldn’t ever have happened – I have seen the postcard, and while it is
attempting satire, its purpose as an advertisement for a record is almost in
the background. Knowing none of The Move receive anything for any time I hear
“Flowers in the Rain” make me want to avoid ever hearing it again, but Van
Morrison still performs “Brown Eyed Girl” despite a similar situation existing
for him, although his relates to the contract he signed at the time. I can only
guess that, if everyone has found their way of dealing with it, and have moved
on, then there is nothing more I can say.